Marine reserves needed
The Government is inching forward with its plan to create six marine reserves off the southeast coast of Otago, covering nearly 1300 square kilometres. The plans would restrict or ban fishing, some kelp harvesting and activities like undersea drilling in areas between Timaru and Waipapa Point in Southland.
Those regions feature nurseries for school sharks, spawning areas for elephant fish, and are home to Hector’s dolphins and little blue and yellow-eyed penguins. The Department of Conservation says we need to give biodiversity the chance to thrive in those ecologically important areas.
Commercial and recreational fishermen will have a lot more to say about the plan in public submissions that run until April 17. Commercial fishermen estimate they’ll take a $3 million hit from the loss of catch. The rock lobster industry will be hit particularly hard.
But these are the trade-offs we will increasingly need to make to deal with the effects of climate change, intensified land use and its resulting pollution.
A team of scientists from the University of Queensland have released a study estimating that 26 per cent of our oceans will require urgent conservation efforts to maintain the planet’s marine biodiversity.
They looked at the marine habitats of 22,000 species and developed a mathematical model to capture a portion of each species’ range, enough to allow them a ‘‘reasonable amount of space’’ to live free of human impacts like fishing and commercial shipping.
They found it would require 8.5 million sqkm of additional conservation areas, particularly in the Northern Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic, which have been pillaged through fishing. Illegal fishing in international waters is also still a major problem.
Ultimately, the scientists say we’ll need something akin to the Paris Agreement on climate action to tackle the problem globally. This will be even harder than Paris.
But hundreds of millions of people rely on the oceans for food and their wellbeing. With oceans warming and acidifying, these ecosystems risk collapse. The sacrifices we make now could give marine species we value so much at least a shot at surviving the rest of this century.
We’ll need something akin to the Paris Agreement on climate action to tackle the problem globally.